Saturday, September 27, 2003
I am tired. Both the superficial exhaustion that comes from working too much and resting too little. I'm not sleeping well, and waking at odd hours (just before 6 a.m. this morning), unable to get back to sleep. I won't even get started about the stress, except to say that one of the many, many things that readers and would-be writers don't know about professional writing is the horrendous stress level involved.
Then there's the other kind of tired, an exhaustion of the soul, but there's really no point talking about that.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,907 words on Chapter Ten of Murder of Angels, which, I believe, is the most I've written in a single day since I was finishing Low Red Moon last August. The words just kept coming and, this close to the end, I wasn't about to cut them off. Suddenly, I was on page 500. So much for this ms. being shorter than Low Red Moon. Last night, our friend Byron came over for "kid night" (see earlier posts), and we all watched The Legend of Boggy Creek and Crimson Rivers.
Poppy has been writing a good deal in her livejournal about the difficulties she's had recently with readers who are unhappy with the non-fantasy direction that her work has taken these past few years, leading up to The Value of X and Liquor. Her comments, and the often suprisingly indelicate remarks from those among her readers who only seem to want Lost Souls II, have served to underscore my own worries about how Murder of Angels will be received. On the one hand, if my readers wanted a sequel to Silk, they're getting it. On the other, the book lies largely, if nolt entirely, in another part of the fantasy spectrum than its predecessor, and it hasn't much to offer the reader who delighted in Silk primarily because it was a novel about punk bands and goths and the hardscrabble existence many who live within subcultures face. Some themes from Silk carry over: insanity, the life of a musician, alcoholism and drug addiction, the search for self and its relationship to reality. In fact, looking at it that way, most of the primary themes of Silk are still present in Murder of Angels. And yet it is a completely different sort of book. It's characters are ten years older, for a start. More importantly, as I've said, it approaches fantasy differently. More head-on, and I worry, because much of the praise for both Silk and Threshold has derived from those novels' subtlety. So, I fear what critics will say (I always do) and what readers will say, and now I have to wonder, seeing what Poppy's had to put up with, if there will be people who feel "betrayed" or "abandoned" because I'm writing a different sort of novel.
I find it hard to believe that there are actually readers who think that part of an author's responsibility to them is to write only what they already know they want to read, even if that means, essentially, writing the same book again and again. I do very much believe that authors have certain responsibilities to their readers, but these do not include writing to the readers' wims. As I see it, we have a covenant, authors and readers. I write what I need to write, and perhaps what I think needs to be written, and you then have the opportunity to read it, if you so choose. If you do read something I've written and don't like it, you have the choice of avoiding my work in the future. If you read something I've written and love it, I'll show you something else, as long as your interest is there. You want stories from me? I'll give them to you. That's the deal. The deal goes that far and no farther. It certainly does not extend to my taking requests, or feeling bound to write to some core audience, for fear of driving them away. For me, it's always been about leading you places that I myself need to explore. You don't have to follow — you get to follow, and you can't expect me to alter my course or stop forever in one spot because you like the view.
And this is why I fear for Murder of Angels, because, while these are still my words, my voice, my eyes, I want to show you something different than you may have come to expect from me. And I am afraid that damned expectation will result in readers never giving the book the same chance they've given my other books. But I am not a brand. I am pleased to have readers. They mean a great deal to me. But I will never be able to write solely to suit their expectations. I often wish that I could. I would have happier agents and editors and a much happier bank account.
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